The Most Interesting Unpaid Job In The World

Written by Stephen Yates

Jun 27, 2007 at 12:00 AM

(Author’s note: this is a slightly refurbished version of a speech delivered at the Upcountry Freedom Conference in Greenville, S.C., June 22, 2007.) A few decades ago there lived a writer named Albert Jay Nock. His beliefs were closest to what we would now call anarcho-apitalism — which includes the idea that the State is such a repository of evil and predation that a humane society would eventually dispense with it once and for all. Nock wrote books with names like Our Enemy, The State (1936). He also penned volumes of essays, many of them very eloquent. He never received any limelight, nor did he much seek it; but a few of his essays have achieved near-classic status. Among the best of these is “Isaiah’s Job,” which I discovered for the first time back in 1995. Unemployed and wondering if I’d thrown away my career for nothing, having written my Civil Wrongs which took no prisoners assaulting the superstitions of academia: affirmative action, multiculturalism, radical feminism, and so on, “Isaiah’s Job” was exactly what the doctor ordered! I have since often turned to this essay when I had doubts about the value of what I was doing, or if I found myself thinking, We’ve lost the country, so why bother? Of course, as Christians we know that this is God’s universe and that we’ll be victorious in the long run. But we don’t know God’s timetable, so that doesn’t mean we won’t be in for a rough ride in the meantime. Scripture, in fact, virtually guarantees that we will. We do know that the majority of Americans—those we sometimes call “the masses”—aren’t much interested in defending their liberties. They’ll trade freedom for security in an instant. They’ll get their Real IDs, for example, perhaps viewing the extra nuisance no differently than they do inflated gas prices. What doesn’t affect them directly and immediately (usually in the wallet or pocketbook) they don’t care about. This brings us to “Isaiah’s Job.” Turn with me to Isaiah 6. The place was Judah; it was the year of King Uzziah’s death (around 740 B.C.). It was a time of so-called prosperity, relative to the time. The people had forgotten God and turned to hedonism and mammon. Into their midst came the prophet Isaiah. The Lord told Isaiah to warn the people that they had gone down the wrong road and had better start backpedaling. Nock’s loose paraphrase of the word of the Lord to Isaiah: “Tell them what a worthless lot they are. Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don’t mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you that it won’t do any good. The official class and the intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.” Sounds like today, when the majority is fairly contented despite those nuisances of high gas prices, high food prices, job insecurity, taxes and inflation. We have credit cards, don’t we? And we have Paris Hilton and American Idol to keep us entertained. The Joe Sixpacks out there who like mindless entertainment will probably stay glued to their TVs as long as the lights stay on. So we might be tempted to ask, as Isaiah doubtless was, “What’s the point? Nobody really cares.” But go back to Isaiah 1:9: “Except that the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.” The essence of the Lord’s response to Isaiah (I am paraphrasing Nock’s paraphrase): “My dear Isaiah, I am your Lord, so you may trust me in all things. Your mission may look hopeless, but there is a Remnant out there you don’t know about. They are mostly isolated from one another, ‘each one rubbing along as best he can.’ They need to be educated, and they need to be encouraged, because when things come crashing down, they are the ones who will organize and rebuild society. Your message will reassure them and keep them hanging on until their time comes. Your job is to take care of this Remnant. So quit whining. Get up off your duff, get to work, and quit wasting time.” Key characteristics of the Remnant take shape over the next few paragraphs of Nock’s essay. (1) Its members value truth. (2) They value honesty. (3) They see the worth of hard work for a rightly cause—all as ends in themselves. (4) They comprise a kind of psychological aristocracy, not dependent for their self-worth on approval by the masses. All this is tacit, unconscious, organic. It is built into their basic make-up. It is not having a specific philosophy that sets the Remnant apart, but an unstated sense of independence from public authority and popular approval. Just as in Isaiah’s world, as in ours. The masses may seem hopeless—and for the most part, probably are—but if God’s word can be trusted, in their midst, unseen by most, is our own Remnant. What did Albert Jay Nock think we could know about this Remnant? (1) You don’t know who they are or where they are or what they are doing, but you can be sure that they exist. (2) If you do your job properly, you will not have to seek them out, for they will find you. What I find encouraging in all this is that Albert Jay Nock was writing in the early 1930s—pecking away on his manual typewriter (or maybe writing in longhand, for all I know). Today, we have talk radio and the Internet. Both have their dark side. Talk radio has its Howard Sterns as well as its Chuck Baldwins; guess which one is rolling in the dough. The Internet has its porn sites and countless time-sinks but also sites like JBS.org, NewsWithViews .com, WorldNetDaily.com, LewRockwell.com, The August Review, Freedom Force International, AmericanDeception.com, and many more. These sites shine the light of truth through the darkness of our contemporary mainstream. Guess which ones the Remnant is most likely to seek out. Here’s the surprise: those of us with this mission in life, of taking care of the Remnant, actually have never had it so easy. We do not have to do what Isaiah did, which was go to street corners, preach to whoever would listen, and dodge the rocks and tomatoes. Those with a gift of gab can go on talk radio, where there are now hundreds of broadcasts reaching every city in the country. Those of us who write, are not stuck preparing leaflets; we can have our pieces uploaded to the Web where anyone can surf in and read them—including the Remnant seeking them out. The masses will not integrate their thoughts to the point of asking, “How can the Bush Administration fight a ‘war on terror’ with America’s borders left wide open?” but the Remnant will. So far as telling the truth about the emerging New World Order goes, our side owns the Internet! I’m sure that there are those in the super-elite—the CFR crowd, the Trilateralists, SPP and North American Forum on Integration types—who wish they could shut it down, or at least bring it under their control as they did the mainstream media decades ago. They’re not omniscient, and I don’t think they anticipated our colonizing cyberspace. For them to attack the Web openly now would give away their hand. Even stealth takeover efforts, e.g., through the UN, quickly come to our attention with alerts in tens of thousands of inboxes within hours. The power elite has no effective way to stop this! The cyber genie is out of the high-tech bottle, and she isn’t going back in! So when we write on the Internet, none of us have any idea who is reading, or where they are, or what they are doing, or (minus a hit counter which probably isn’t accurate anyway) how many there are. We know only that they exist and that they indeed find us, because they send us emails (after publishing an article I am usually inundated). But only a small fraction of readers email. Can you imagine how many who are reading, don’t? Our readers are finding us, as the sites where we publish get tens of thousands of unique hits monthly. Most of these sites are unable to pay their writers, though. NewsWithViews.com is a one-room operation relying on donations and sales of books to survive. This is typically the case. Unless you write for the masses, you have a choice: write for free, or don’t write. Turning back to Albert Jay Nock: “It may be thought … that while taking care of the Remnant is no doubt a good job, it is not an especially interesting job because it is as a rule so poorly paid. I have my doubts about this. There are other compensations to be got out of a job besides money and notoriety, and some of them seem substantial enough to be attractive. Many jobs which do not pay well are yet profoundly interesting … and the job of looking after the Remnant seems to me, as I have surveyed it for many years from my seat in the grandstand, to be as interesting as any that can be found in the world.” How do we best do this most interesting of unpaid jobs—taking care of the Remnant? We outlined the basics above: (1) Tell the truth, to the best of your ability, keep telling it, and don’t stray from it. (2) Be scrupulously honest, and purge yourself of ulterior motives again to the best of your ability: if the Remnant suspect your motives, they will smell a rat and sheer off (as Nock puts it). (3) Give your best, as opposed to watering down your message to enlarge your audience. It is not the size of your audience that counts, but its quality; it is not the level of income your message brings in that counts, but its content.   To see how not to take care of the Remnant, behold Rick Warren of megachurch superstardom. He has a huge congregation; he’s rich and famous—but what is his theology? And why was the CFR interested in him? Why did he join when they invited him? Is it because he is easily duped? The bottom line: the “church growth” movement preaches to the masses, not to the Remnant; the message, whatever it is, is correspondingly diluted. Red flags should pop up all over the place. The Remnant, we should always remember, want only the very best we have to offer. They don’t trust compromises; they don’t want dumb-downs; they don’t want feel-good nonsense. We have the Internet—something Isaiah did not have and something Albert Jay Nock did not have. This makes the job of taking care of the Remnant all the more interesting. I might hedge a little here at the end. Some publications pay, and we writers (like  preachers) do accept voluntary contributions to our cause (chuckle, chuckle). But these matters aside, taking care of the Remnant really is the most interesting unsalaried job in the world. With today’s technology, I don’t think the Remnant is as unorganized and inarticulate as it was in Nock’s day. No one need think he or she is alone. Members of the Remnant populate various political independent and patriot movements, the Minutemen, home-schooling groups, and many others. They often own their own businesses, it seems; or are otherwise self-employed. It seems to me that in these times when obviously something has gone terribly wrong, even some of those we would normally associate with the masses are at least willing to listen. In my more optimistic moments I find myself wondering if we really are approaching the day of a critical mass that will turn this country around. This critical mass need not be a majority. It need only be that “irate, tireless minority” Samuel Adams referred to, “keen to set brushfires in people’s minds.” Most of us, however, doubtless have the feeling that time is getting short. That rough ride may be just around the corner. We have come a long way, but we still have a lot of work to do, and since we don’t know the specifics of God’s agenda or His timetable, there are no guarantees—just the job He gave Isaiah. So let us all quit whining, get up off our duffs, hop to the business of taking care of the Remnant after we leave this conference, and not waste any more time. Thank you very much! --------------------------------------- Steven Yates teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College, and is on the board of the South Carolina chapter of Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA. The views expressed in his columns are his own, and do not reflect official views of any of these institutions or organizations. His latest book World-views: Christian Theism versus Modern Materialism, was published last year by The Worldviews Project (for more information call 864-288-0043). He is at work on a new book tentatively entitled The Real Matrix. His email address is: